not reach his true end or final goal. Dreamy illusions about it have always haunted his soul as unsubstantial surrogates. When man now in the making is finished, what we at present call old age will be a sort of superhumanity, a new and higher story, and its completion will spontaneously bring with it new and deeper insights; and he will approach and finally enter Nirvana with the same zest and buoyancy with which he now takes possession of life. Crude and amateurish as often is Metchnikoff’s philosophy, his courage, candor, and the strength of his convictions are commendable, and the faith he adds to his knowledge is full of hope. From his ideal thinker, Schopenhauer, he caught the flavor of the Vedanta and Upanishads but he did not see how these very ideals also underlay the mystic hermetic philosophy of the medieval alchemists and their royal art, as modern symbolists like Hitchcock and Silberer interpret them; and to this I shall revert later. If he overestimated the value of his panacea and ventured into fields of other experts in which he was ignorant and where he was often mistaken, he has at least made a very valuable addition to the yet all too meager literature on senectitude, which all thoughtful and intelligent aging people can read not only with profit but with pleasure, if only they have escaped from the narrow limits of orthodox Philistia. To have really edified this now ever growing section of all civilized countries is a real culture service. His work is uniquely inspired by a spirit psychologically very akin to that which impelled Buddha when he set out on his mission of finding The Way, stimulated to do so by the sight of an aging man and a putrefying corpse.[171]